There’s an interesting article over at the Beeb you might want to look over. It starts being an article about the imbalance between the sexes among 16-17 year olds in Sweden but it takes a sort of left turn. As it turns out the number of migrants presenting themselves for asylum in Sweden is remarkably skewed towards a) males, b) teenagers, and c) people from Afghanistan and Syria. After examining some of these teenagers a little more closely it turns out that some of them are in their late 20s.
If the truth be told, I suspect that we’d learn that the asylum seekers were from all over the Middle East, North Africa, and West Asia and they’re telling the stories they think need to be told to be granted asylum. There are all sorts of possible explanations for why they skew so heavily male but my own pet theory is that they’re mostly draft dodgers, military deserters, criminals, and present or former terrorists. That would be understandable under the circumstances but not as sympathetic as young families fleeing war.
There’s an uncomfortable truth reflected in this article. How in the heck do you check the bona fides of people from countries where patronymics are used as names and reliable censuses haven’t been conducted for years if ever? In Europe people were forced to adopt permanent surnames coincidentally right about the time that modern states were forming and reliable censuses began to be taken. That’s an interesting story and one I’ve written about before.
I think the sad truth is that the only country that’s really capable of screening asylum seekers is United States and we’re only capable of screening a small number: those who’ve worked with our military and we do that by direct testimony. Yes, that’s the guy. Yes, he worked for us.
As it is Sweden, Denmark, Germany, et al. will end up granting permanent asylum to the guys who tell the best sob story. In my cynical view those will skew heavily towards criminals and terrorists but we’ll see. It will be a learning experience for all involved.
People need to stop worrying about the sex differences. Once they’re established they’ll bring in their extended families so they can marry two or three of their cousins. Problem solved! And what’s a few mass rapes in public in the meantime if it means DIVERSITY in the long run? Because, as we know, DIVERSITY IS STRENGTH!
The reason it skews male are cultural. Most places of origin are highly patriarchal. Women are basically considered property of the family until they are married off to become the property of another family. Women have no mobility, have no hope of fleeing without their family – attempts are considered dishonorable by their family and the smuggling networks are not kind to unaccompanied women. Those who try to escape and aren’t found and killed by their families will usually end with endless rape, exploitation and death at the hands of smugglers. It’s little wonder that very few try and even fewer succeed.
By contrast the cultures allow and encourage mobility in men. Their economic prospects are poor, and their options are limited, so fleeing is often a good choice and it’s often encourage by the family so they can send back remittances.
And nothing you wrote, Andy, makes those young males any more appealing to a Western society. At least not a Western society that was sane.
Related.
Women don’t generally participate in fleeing as refugees, just like they don’t generally participate in most all of life’s activities apart from those having to do with sex, porn, acting and breeding. Just like they hardly count at Facebook or Google, they also hardly show up as backpack travelers, cinematographers, cabinetmakers, physicists, economists, plumbers or even leaders in haute couture or haute cuisine. Almost never as inventors or Nobel Prize winners.
If we followed the Greek or Roman model, they wouldn’t show up as actors or even porn stars, I suppose. If it weren’t for the hard-wired reality of Nature, they wouldn’t even be needed for breeding or sex, either, and the Japanese dolls are threatening their indispensability regarding sex.
Ultimately, society requires that women be bred, reared, maintained and employed in their indispensable role in breeding, unless and until the Japanese figure that part out, too.
Please produce evidence for your claim.
Andy:
That’s not the case in the Somali refugee camps in Kenya despite despite Somali society having the characteristics you’ve outlined.
According to the UNHCR slightly more than a majority of the refugees in Turkey are women. I think my explanation fits the facts better.
Special circumstances justify special treatment. Floods of refugees are “special”, ditto age and sex-skewed ratios.
I’d take them in, tentatively, then filter them. “You’re 40 and have a family and can support yourself at a trade? Welcome to Sweden, and here’s a voucher for a housing subsidy and here’s the social worker who’s going get you all settled in.” Or “You’re 18 and male and all alone and have no education? We’ll take you in thirty days, house you in a camp. feed you, and give you a set of new clothes, and if you can’t find work then, sorry. but you’ll have to be on your way again. Alternately, join the army. We’re Sweden, we’ve got the world’s prettiest women and lots else to defend. Service means citizenship!”
The asylum-seekers are supposed to be seeking protection, either due to persecution (UN refugee-status), or risk of injury from armed-conflict (Sweden’s supplementary protection).
Economic migrants are looking for economic opportunity, and might be scouting ahead for family members to follow.
The first group shouldn’t skew too much gender-wise, through refugee status is available to those who are at risk of being conscripted into an army that will commit war crimes. But we wouldn’t expect men to escape to safety, leaving their women behind. One explanation might be that the female refugees escaped to safety in Turkey, and the men are scouting ahead for better opportunities.
Well, if they’re going to Sweden expecting jobs they’re going to be disappointed. Of the refugees who were accepted in 2003, by 2013 about 50% had jobs. That’s not a state secret. It’s well known and highly publicized.
What the Swedes say is that they’re not an “American model” society with lots of low skill/low wage jobs. We didn’t used to be, either.
@mike, Sweden has an unemployment rate of 19.4% for those under 24 yrs old. Its pretty predictable that they are not going to be able to find jobs.
Sweden (and several other European states) needs more soldiers. They can damn well take in immigrants, teach them the language and some skills (and maybe some social attitudes) and give them citizenship after four or five years. We do, and I’ve never seen a serious complaint about it.
As I said, special circumstances justify special treatment. This isn’t 2006 any more.
Both Germany and Sweden have all-volunteer militaries. With the way their militaries are structured I doubt they have any more use for guys who don’t read or write German than their industry does. Military conscription is the rule in the Middle East and North Africa. I doubt you’ll find many takers.
“They can damn well take in immigrants, teach them the language and some skills (and maybe some social attitudes) and give them citizenship after four or five years.”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dV8eT0zqP5s
Dave,
A large refugee camp in a border country is not the same thing as a refugee traveling to Sweden. In a border camp you are much more likely to get women and families simply because of proximity. You also don’t need money or human smuggling network. It’s easier for large family groups to stick together, etc.
By contrast, a destination like Sweden requires extended illicit travel through multiple countries, which almost always requires some kind of human trafficking network. For a variety of reasons (culture, money, safety, time) it’s primarily men who use these networks to get to a different region like Europe or North America.
You’re arguing against yourself. Your previous claim was that the imbalance was due to immutable social factors. Now your claim is that it’s practical.
It’s either social or practical. The social factors don’t change because they’re impractical. It sounds to me like you’re engaging in special pleading.
However, I’m inclined to agree with your concluding assessment:
if you’d include in your reckoning that the men who travel belong to the same demographic to which soldiers, criminals, and terrorists are most likely to belong, that those are among your variety of factors, and there’s no practical way to screen them.
Are they all either criminals or terrorists? Of course not. But the proportion of both are likely to be higher than in the refugee camps in Turkey.
Fortunately, it’s not our problem but the Europeans’ but there’s an irony in the making. If a terrorist attack on the United States is mounted by one of the migrants that the Canadians are so generously admitting (but not screening), we may need a wall between Canada and the United States and we should make Canada pay for it.
That’s not a state secret. It’s well known and highly publicized.
And led to riots in 2013 and 2014, IIRC.
…
As to letting in these friendly young men from Syria and then giving them a bunch of machine guns, tanks and artillery – you really think these guys are going to fight for Germany against the Russians, as opposed to turning the gun on the Germans and taking what they want? “Oh yes, here mister gang rapist & your friends, take these rifles and move into my house to protect my wife and daughters from those evil men hundreds of miles away!” Seriously, you think that’s a good idea?
My point was that it’s more than likely that the migrants know they’re going to Germany and Sweden without the likelihood of getting a job.
My first comment was a response to the post, which was about Sweden specifically, but I took it to mean Europe and the West generally. You didn’t mention border refugee camps in Kenya or Turkey which are substantially different in terms of demographics from those who travel to Sweden.
Secondly, I said “culture” not “immutable social factors” (they aren’t the same thing) and if you read my first comment thoroughly you’ll see I don’t entirely neglect the practical factors such a remittances and the differences in how smuggling networks treat women vs how they treat men.
Third, one thing I didn’t mention is that the EU has a policy of family reunification, so once a person is granted asylum the rest of the family can travel legally to the host country and often for free. So, knowing that, families will pool their money to afford the high price of a human smuggler (usually several years worth of income) to get one person to Europe to get refugee status so the rest can join them. Or, failing that, they can remain and work illegally in the black market to send money home (the poorer ones will rot in indentured servitude “paying off” the cost of their travel). The person chosen to make the trip is invariably a man, not because they are draft dodgers, military deserters, criminals, or present or former terrorists, but because of culturally driven gender roles. Additionally, potential refugees probably know that smuggling networks will divert women to a sex trafficking network where they’ll disappear.
None of those factors apply to the border camps in Turkey or Kenya.
Fourth, there are obviously unmarried men who also flee to Europe or otherwise outside their home region and try to become refugees. Because of cultural differences it is much, much easier for unmarried men them to attempt that than it is for unmarried women.
Finally, I agree that some portion of those men will be draft dodgers, military deserters, criminals, and present or former terrorists but I don’t think that’s nearly sufficient to explain the gender disparity we’ve seen in the EU for at least the last two decades.
As a side note here’s a good example of why the West shouldn’t be admitting most of these so-called refugees, aside from the culture they bring with them.
This is how this situation worked with the Arabs whom call themselves ‘Palestinians.’
The 1946 Brit census identified around 525, 000 Arabs in what later became Israel. Many of them had come there fairly because of the labor shortage created just prior and during WWII when the Brits refused to let Jews migrate to Palestine when they were fleeing Europe on the eve of the Holocaust. Over 1/3 of Palestine’s Jews went into uniform to fight Hitler for the Brits, so the Brits allowed unlimited migration for Arabs during this period.
After the 1948 war, there were approximately 120,000 Arabs whom stayed in what became Israel and became full citizens. That would give us a figure of something like 405,000 Arabs wh oleft what became Israel.
Yet the amount of Arabs whom claimed refugee status via UNRWA even though a number of them (including Mahmoud Abbas) had left voluntarily was something along the lines of 750,000!
Where did the others come from?
The answer’s pretty simple. John Blandford Jr., American Director of UNRWA admitted while testifying before Congress in 1952 that UNRWA had no real ability to check who was actually a refugee and who wasn’t, so they simply admitted anyone who liked the idea of free housing, food and medical care. and gave them refugee status .
Their descendants still claim refugee status four generation later, and today there are an estimate 4.7 million of them living in UNRWA facilities in Judea, Samaria, Gaza, Lebanon, Jordan and elsewhere…on the dime of the taxpayers of America and Europe.
It’s a wonderful deal for the Arab countries, whom have never had to pay a dime to support the refugees they created by attacking Israel in 1948…or to compensate the almost one million Jews ethnically cleansed from the Arab world after 1948 for the estimated $1.3 trillion dollars in today’s money that was plundered from them in property, real estate, businesses,bank accounts and personal effects.